Adobe have at least announced that they’re going to kill off Flash entirely in three year’s time.
Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
– Adobe
You might not miss Flash too much, it’s second only to Microsoft when hackers search for unpatched vulnerabilities and with HTML 5 it’s well past it’s sell by date.
It would however be wrong to be be too hasty in consigning Flash to the recycle bin without at least acknowledging it’s contribution to the Internet. Long before Adobe acquired Flash it Macromedia that unleashed Flash Player on the Internet and there’s scarcely a person who’s played online games that hasn’t used Flash at some point in their browsing past.
Flash then became prolific for advertising and as time went past become buggy and a constant source of browser crashes not to mention numerous security flaws in unpatched versions and so slowly browsers started to drop support or insist that users click to enable Flash on a case by case basis.
The Internet would have been a much more boring place 20 years ago, but in 2020 I won’t be mourning the passing of Flash. I’ll simply breath a sigh of relief that it’ll no longer be inflicted upon me on website I’d rather used other technology.
If you still use Flash on your website, speak to your designer and make sure they get you upgraded sooner rather than later. There may be three years of life left in Flash, Firefox Chrome and Safari are all limiting support and it’s likely that well before the 2020 deadline your Flash elements won’t render in most browsers anyway.
